January 3, 2012
Santa Barbara: tailored to the 1 percent
Another town, another dissipated Occupation.
I had stopped here in Santa Barbara – the town where the affluent of LA move to when they get sick of the city – not so much because of its reputation for activism, but rather because I didn’t want to take a train into Los Angeles in the middle of the night.
And besides, from previous trips there, I knew there was no shortage of transient street kids there, so I gambled that they might be keeping the camping going.
No such luck.
In fact, much like in Boulder and Ashland, the transients viewed the local Occupy movement with a healthy dose of disdain.
“They’re a bunch of middle-aged yuppies,” one young man told me when I approached him on a corner of State Street, the main drag in Santa Barbara that is chocked full of chain stores, like Sunglass Hut and Coldwater Creek, mixed in with a few high end restaurants and fish taco joints.
“You should do a story on street kids instead. We’re the real 99 percent,” he added.
State Street, the main drag in Santa Barbara
Much as Santa Barbara is a haunt of the rich and more rich, it also attracts a fair number of transients. Many of the ones I spoke to were visibly drunk. Some were drinking right there on State Street, right across from the Sunglass Hut and a Starbucks.
I wasn’t surprised. The drunk street kids tend to congregate in the warmer climates because it’s hard to be intoxicated in the cold weather. One guy told me I could sleep on the beach, but it got down to 40 degrees. I remembered camping with Occupy Lincoln in Nebraska, when the temperature dropped down into the the teens. That camp had a no-alcohol policy.
One girl on the street I talked to said she was staying with Occupy Seattle for while but it got too cold and wet. She then spent some time with Occupy Monterey, she said, but left because, like in Lincoln, they had a stringent alcohol policy. So instead she came to Santa Barbara.
The first guy I talked to told me that Occupy Santa Barbara had ceased occupying the plaza outside of City Hall a few weeks back when the police had begun issuing tickets. He also said they still meet there for general assemblies on Saturdays, but never during the week anymore.
Much as he was rough around the edges, I got more information from him than from the local movement. I sent them an email on Monday morning and got a one line response at around midnight.
“has someone contacted you yet?” it read.
Wanting to squeak out some sort of story from my stay in Santa Barbara, I quickly responded that no one had, and that I would love to talk to someone. But that was the last I heard.
So instead I spent Tuesday morning before jumping onto this train headed for San Diego sipping a latte under a palm tree on the beach. I guess I can see why the Occupy movement wouldn’t be going so strong here in Santa Barbara. The whole town just lends itself to taking it easy and living like the 1 percent.
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Hello Bob,
Sorry that we missed your visit. Please let me highlight what OccupySB has been up to:
1. Educational rallies and marches every Saturday. These usually have a theme. The last couple weeks were focused on the NDAA and SOPA pieces of legislation that the President just signed and is working its way through Congress, respectively.
2. We meet twice a week in General Assemblies: Wed @ 6pm and Saturday after our rally (appox. 2pm or so).
3. We have multiple working groups including Occupy Foreclosures, Occupy Flashmob, Occupy Food, etc. Each of these groups have been coming up with inventive and great actions to best impact our local community.
4. Two events this weekend: one being our usual rally on Saturday and this event with our local Latino communities.
https://www.facebook.com/events/244336338973638/
5. We have recently been umbrelled as a non-profit by a very respectable group in our community, the Fund for Santa Barbara. http://www.fundforsantabarbara.org/
6. We have a pro-bono law team of five civil rights lawyers who are taking the city to court for violating our First Amendment rights.
7. We have a group who is Occupying City Hall public comment time weekly asking for everything from an end to illegal foreclosures to a symbolic vote against corporate personhood.
I could go on but I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, due to 11 arrests and over 70 citations, we have evolved to Occupy 2.0 actions outside the park, (which is technically an easement, and should not be subject to park rules, but that is another topic). I apologize for no one getting back to you via email. The vast majority of our core organizers are working 1-2 jobs and/or going to school. Resources have been stretched thin.
Thanks for writing about Occupy. In unity and solidarity.
Marshall
And so it goes. Santa Barbara was the birthplace of America’s New Age spiritual movement. It started in the 19th century with a rag tag group of what would much later be known as hippies. They settled in the verdant forest and wrote poems and songs and manifestos. They grew their hair long and ran around naked in their gardens. They opened America’s first health food store downtown. Soon to be world famous writers made the pilgrimage to this hitherto unknown oasis only to see if it was true. This spirit must still be somewhere in the ever renewing flowers on the hillside. Keep the faith, you few of the big perspective — inside the very decline is the seed of tomorrow’s promise.